


Quiet in the Library

by follow_the_sun



Series: Shrinkyclinks Hijinks [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Do not mess with them, Gen, Librarians, Libraries, You will be shushed.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 11:26:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16809700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: She was the Asset. She was the New Fist of Hydra. And if she believes the man on the bridge, then once, a very long time ago, she was someone named Peggy Carter.She needs help figuring out who she is now. And when you need information, there's only one place to go.





	Quiet in the Library

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is a companion piece to part 3 of my Shrinkyclinks series, featuring Winter Soldier!Peggy and starting from just after the Triskelion battle. It may be readable without the rest of the series, but I make no guarantees.
> 
> Gratitude, as always, to Beradan. Her help was invaluable and any remaining errors in librarianship are mine.

The soldier’s ears fill with noise when her head breaks the surface of the water.

There’s a blare of sirens off to the east, toward the highway, and the thumping sound of helicopters overhead. There are screams, shouts, and at least one high, hysterical laugh cutting through the air—and why not? Losing their minds is what civilians do at times like this. The soldier has used fear as a tactic before to make her targets get sloppy and make mistakes, although she prefers to avoid it if she can. Fear makes people unpredictable. It’s useful if they freeze or run, but every so often, there’s that one whose instincts kick into fight mode… and she wasn’t expecting that the skinny blonde man she’s pulling out of the water by his collar would be one of them.

The soldier thinks about these things while she pulls herself and her former target up the riverbank, in a thoroughly unsuccessful attempt to take her mind off the fact that her world has just imploded around her with a crash to rival the crumbling Triskelion.

He called her Peggy. He gave her a name.

The soldier knew she had a name, of course. Theoretically. Nobody gets this far through life without a name. She’s just never thought about the fact that she didn’t know it. How often does a person say their own name inside their head? She always knew when she was being addressed, and the fact that it was in an impersonal military style didn’t bother her because that’s what she is: a soldier.

Was a soldier.

Now, for the first time she can remember, she knows who she is, but not what.

The skinny blonde man is breathing, at least. Not well—there’s a lot of gagging and wheezing going on—but if his lungs are fighting the influx of filthy river water, it must be a good sign. He looks like he’d been through a few fights already before they faced off, but he doesn’t seem to have taken any serious damage from the fall. It’s safe to assume that anything that was going to kill him would have done it already.

That  _ she  _ would have done it alrea— 

No. Going down that road right now isn’t going to yield any useful results.

She rolls him onto his side before she leaves him, looking down at his oddly familiar face one more time. His eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t wake. That’s good, because she wouldn’t know what to do if he did. She brushes her hair out of her face and walks up the riverbank, her hands automatically undoing the straps and buckles over her chest. 

Under the body armor, she wears a tightly fitted black bodysuit that will probably attract the wrong kind of attention on the street, but in a different way than the tactical gear. And no one is paying much attention to her anyway, in spite of her unusual attire and generally wet, bedraggled appearance—which only becomes a drawback when she discovers that everyone is so busy running around in a panic, or worse, photographing the cloud of dust rising from what used to be the Triskelion, that no one wants to listen to her. In the end, she has to march right up to a D.C. policeman, one of many who’s trying to herd the nosiest civilians away from the river, and draw on acting skills she didn’t know she had in order to pretend to babble hysterically about an injured, unconscious man by the water. The cop gives her a startled look, but he pulls out his radio and starts summoning help, and she makes sure that by the time he turns back to look at her again, she’s gone.

Normal protocol dictates that when a mission ends decisively, in either success or failure, she should return to headquarters, in this case the vault under the bank. It didn’t occur to her until long after protocol went out the window that she never got any specific orders for today’s aftermath. From there, it’s a small leap to the conclusion that Pierce didn’t expect her to survive. Adding this to the fact that it will take weeks to sort out the mess in the river and they may never be sure they’ve found all the bodies, she concludes that she’s got a window before anyone comes looking for her. It isn’t until she’s hiked away from the riverbank and into an area of little strip malls and storefronts that she realizes she’s not even considering giving Pierce the benefit of the doubt. She’s been blindly obeying orders for so long—or so she assumes; most of her memories before today are a puzzling blur—that it’s startling how quickly she slips back into the habits of defiance.

So: how is she going to disappear?

Watching the parking lot of the strip mall, she finds her answer. People are spilling out of various doorways, presumably all wanting a look at the plume of smoke and concrete dust rising up from the riverbank. If they had the sense God gave a goose, they’d be fleeing the scene, not getting out cell phones to take pictures of it, but that’s not her problem to deal with. A few of the women in the lot are dressed in clothing oddly similar to hers: tight, stretchy, form-fitting, unsuitable for the street. The sign on the building calls it a fitness center, and when she walks inside, she finds the staff glued to a television mounted on the wall, playing more footage of the Triskelion. The news anchor is blathering about S.H.I.E.L.D. and terrorism and things called avengers, but the soldier ignores her in favor of following her instincts toward a door marked Women’s Locker Room. 

The deserted space is a treasure trove. The lockers are secured with flimsy padlocks that she has no trouble snapping, and after a few false starts, she finds one with clothes inside that not only fit her but also appeal to her sense of style: a dark suit jacket and skirt, a white shirt, stockings. She strips off the bodysuit and risks thirty seconds under one of the showerheads before towelling off, combing her fingers through her wet hair, and pulling on the clothes. The skirt doesn’t quite zip up the back, but the jacket will cover that; the shoulders of both the shirt and jacket are too tight, and the bra is all wrong, but at a glance, she’ll pass. She spends three times as long looking for shoes that fit, knowing her life could very well depend on speed, until she lucks into a pair of flat Mary Janes that fit with minimal pinching. She opens several purses and finds wallets, removing a few bills from each and tucking them into her bra, then chooses a large shoulder bag and dumps the contents into the bottom of the locker to make room for her pistol and knives. The staff at the desk never look away from the screen as she leaves the locker room and walks out the front door.

This, she knows, has been the easy part.

The soldier blends in. She doesn’t remember learning the skill, but she isn’t half bad at it, especially once she collects the appropriate materiel for her op. She hoards several clothing options in the bag she never lets go of: the skirt and blazer, for looking authoritative; a sweater over a buttoned blouse and jeans, for looking casual; a shapeless sweatshirt with some sports team’s logo long since faded into illegibility, for blending in at a bus stop or homeless shelter. Her new bag is a find, no doubt about it: bigger than the one she swiped from the locker room, this one is a large leather tote, scuffed and water-damaged on one side but almost new-looking on the other, which adds a bohemian air to the nice clothes when she carries it good-side-out but turns around for instant believability as salvage from a dumpster. (Actually, it’s from a thrift shop outside Baltimore, where she spent a week lurking near a Hydra safe house, telling herself she was doing reconnaissance while really just hoping someone might show up who she could beat into submission and then choke some answers out of, but no one did, and she left unsatisfied.)

At first, she’s able, if not exactly content, to drift from city to city without dwelling too much on her situation. Every time she tries to think about the helicarrier, her mind simply shies away from it. She suspects that her brain is doing exactly what a body does when it’s been badly mistreated: going numb, pushing the pain down until she’s regained the strength to cope with it. So she wanders, drifting along the bus routes, flying under the radar in each new city until instinct tells her to move on, then lifting enough cash for a few good meals and a bus ticket before she chooses her next random destination. (She does try to take it from people who can spare it, and really, it’s astonishing how many sleek, expensive cars she finds with cash in the glove box, or a wallet left carelessly in the console, once she pops the laughably flimsy door locks. Eventually she’ll need a more permanent source of income, but right now, staying on the move and out of Pierce’s clutches is far more important than a little petty theft, even if she does have an odd feeling that the skinny blonde man would be disappointed by her behavior.) 

It’s somewhere outside of Pittsburgh that her vagabond existence comes stuttering to a halt. She holes up in a long-empty house with a curling and faded For Rent sign in the window; the electricity doesn’t work, but the water and gas do, so she lights the stubs of emergency candles she finds under the sink and take a reasonably hot shower. She wraps herself up in her blanket—a thin, cheap fleece she only picked up because it rolled up tight enough to fit in her bag, but surprisingly warm for all that—and goes to sleep, and her dreams are no worse than the usual muddle of isolated faces and general unpleasant feelings. Whatever her subconscious is holding back, it’s decided that it doesn’t need to manifest in nightmares yet, and she sleeps lightly but well and wakes up feeling refreshed.

But this time, she also wakes up with a name in her head: Captain America.

Closing her eyes again, she can almost see the words floating in front of her, connected to other ideas only by the most tenuous strings. It has something to do with the blonde man on the helicarrier, except he was… bigger? No, that’s madness. People grow; they don’t shrink. And the shield! She’s sure she remembers the shield—in fact, she feels in her bones that the helicarrier wasn’t the first time she took a shot at it. Images and memories shift in her head like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope: brightly colored, fractured, incomplete. And even if she could see the whole picture, how could she tell how much of it was real?

The soldier needs independent verification, and there isn’t a single human being she trusts to provide it. She needs a source that can’t be working for Hydra, can’t disseminate, and above all, can’t put her in danger of being brought back in.

She knows where she needs to go.

Holly Delecki is sitting under the “Ask A Librarian” sign when the homeless woman comes in. Later, she won’t be able to say what exactly made her so sure she was looking at a destitute and slightly lost person; the woman is scrupulously clean, with careful makeup, and wearing a nondescript cardigan and jeans, which, considering the library sits between two college campuses, makes her one of the best-dressed people here. Something about her eyes, maybe. There’s a word for eyes like that: haunted, maybe, or hunted. Then again, pretty much every time in her life that Holly has said something like that out loud, somebody has told her she reads too many books, as if that’s a thing that’s possible.

Anyway, Holly likes the reference desk. She likes helping people find what they’re looking for, and after too many summers in retail, she likes working in a place where nobody gets hassled if they don’t spend any money. And that no matter who they are, everybody can get help from a librarian.

“Can I help you find something?” she says, leaning forward and smiling as the woman approaches the desk.

“Yes. Perhaps.” The stranger looks… well, nervous isn’t the word. Cautious. Reserved—Holly stops herself before she goes full thesaurus. “I was hoping to find a book about Captain America.”

Well, that’s easy. Guy’s been in the news so much lately, she can just about recite the library’s Cap collection by heart. “Sure thing,” she says. “What kind of information on Captain America are you looking for?”

“I… I don’t really know anything,” the woman says, and then it clicks. The woman is British, which means she didn’t go through the mandatory “The U.S. Single-Handedly Saves the World from the Bad Nazis” unit that all American kids got in about fifth grade. Not that Holly, a history major before she went for her MLS, is at all annoyed by the sanitized narrative she was fed right up until Modern European History 202. The cardinal rule of being a reference librarian is that you give the patron the information they want, regardless of why they want it, but she instantly resolves that whatever British Lady goes away with, it won’t be limited to the shiny propaganda story. 

“Okay,” she says. “Come on over to the catalog and I’ll see what we’ve got. I’m Holly, by the way,” she says, holding out her hand.

The woman hesitates for what feels like a long moment before taking it. “Elizabeth,” she says.

Half the job is teaching the patrons how to use the library system for themselves, so Holly sits Elizabeth down in the chair to walk her through the most basic search there is. If she turns out to be after something more in-depth, they’ll switch to the databases. “Okay, go ahead and open the browser—”

“I really don’t know anything about computers.”

“Oh, that’s fine. You click on that little blue icon, there.” Holly points at the screen. Elizabeth frowns at it, then taps the icon with a fingernail, tentatively, and Holly blinks. “Sorry, we don’t have touchscreens yet, you need to use the mouse.” 

Elizabeth looks at her blankly. “Mouse?”

Elizabeth can’t possibly be more than about thirty, but she’s acting like she’s never used a computer before… which would pretty much imply that she’s either time-traveled to get here or just beamed down from another planet. Well, Holly thinks, carefully not smiling, that would make her about the third-weirdest patron who’s been in today. Of course, it’s also entirely possible that this is a setup; as far as she knows, the library board has never planted anyone to come in and vet the job the staff is doing, but anything is possible. “May I?” she says, reaching over Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Here’s the mouse. Moving it here moves this little arrow on the screen, and double-clicking—like this—opens the program. Then click the search bar, here, and type in whatever you want to find. So in this case, you can start with a subject search for ‘Captain America.’”

Elizabeth sets her hands over the keyboard and arches her wrists in what looks like an incredibly painful position, but Holly can’t fault her typing speed. When Elizabeth clicks Search, unprompted, and the screen fills with results, Holly says, “Okay, results from this branch are at the top. So this is a biography of the original Captain America from World War II; this is a DVD of the movie that came out in 1953 starring Paul Newman; this is a book with an opinion on the American military, which includes a chapter on military superheroes; this is—”

“What do you mean, the original Captain America?” Elizabeth asks. Holly has the feeling she wouldn’t have interrupted under normal circumstances, but this phrase has startled her, somehow.

“That’s the one the current one is modeled after. If you’re after information about the new Cap, I’m afraid there aren’t many books on him specifically, but we have a few about the Avengers—there was kind of a rush to publish those right after the Chitauri invasion—and we can also look at the magazines, and the scholarly databases, and interlibrary loan.”

“I’d like a book on each,” Elizabeth says. “The... ‘original’ and the new one.”

“Okay, great.” Holly prints off the results of the first search before she takes Elizabeth back to the home screen to run a search for Captain America, Modern Version. She knows there won’t be much: most of the Avengers (which is to say, the ones who aren’t Tony Stark) guard their real identities pretty carefully—or at least, they did before whatever craziness went down at the Triskelion last month. The media, and plenty of government employees who know how to do large-scale data-sorting algorithms, are still combing through decades of data in various levels of encryption, and more specific revelations will probably keep coming for years, but Holly hasn’t heard that anybody’s released New Cap’s real name yet. She pauses on  _ I Was There When The Aliens Landed: A Pictorial History of the Chitauri Invasion,  _ which is actually pretty great, despite the sensational title; it’s a compilation of news stories, photos, and interview transcripts from eyewitnesses. (If Holly herself is partial to it because it has a couple of fantastic shots of Thor’s biceps, well, nobody but her needs to know.) “I can recommend this one,” she tells Elizabeth. “It’s got a section on each of the Avengers, and it’s pretty factual, mostly avoids the, uh, more imaginative theories on the new Cap.”

“Such as?” Elizabeth asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, you know—that he’s actually the real Steve Rogers but some supervillain had him cryogenically frozen all this time, or he was part of some secret government experiment to recreate the original super-serum, or that he’s part alien himself, or whatever. I mean, no offense to anyone,” Holly adds, realizing she’s inadvertently strayed onto some dangerous turf; she’s not supposed to judge the patrons, just help them find what they want. “I’ve just literally never seen anyone disprove any information Pepper Potts put out in a press conference, and she didn’t try to cover up the fact that Thor was an alien, so if she says the new Cap is just an ordinary soldier with a fancy prosthetic, I believe it.”

Elizabeth looks bemused, but she nods. “Can you show me where to find the books?”

“Sure thing.” Holly walks her over to the stacks, where Elizabeth selects both that book and  _ Just a Guy from Brooklyn: The True Story of Captain America.  _ She tracing her fingers over the author’s name in surprise. “Dr. Gabriel Jones,” she says. “That name sounds familiar.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised. It’s really too bad people mostly remember him as one of Captain America’s sidekicks, because he’s an amazing guy in his own right. One of the first black PhD candidates _and_ one of the first black senators, plus he helped found S.H.I.E.L.D. Which, of course, turned out to be like forty percent Hydra, but that’s hardly his fault. Uh, you okay?”

“Yes.” Elizabeth visibly stiffened at the word  _ Hydra, _ but she shakes it off. “You’re very knowledgeable.”

“Thanks. History’s kind of my thing. Would you like me to hold those books at the desk for you until you’re ready to check them out?”

Elizabeth frowns. “I haven’t got a library card.”

“No problem. I can set you up with one. It’d just take any ID, or a piece of mail with your name and address on it.”

“I… haven’t got…”

So Holly’s first instinct was right: she doesn’t have a fixed address. “If you left your ID at home,” she says, perfectly happy to give her an out, “then I can’t let you check out any materials today, but you’re welcome to sit and read here for as long as you want. The chairs over by the windows are actually pretty comfortable.”

Elizabeth shoots her a look that lands somewhere between grateful and slightly suspicious, but she nods, takes both books, and curls up in leather reading chair close to the door. Holly makes it back to the reference desk before she lets herself sigh.

“So, teaching another one how to work the newfangled computing machines?” her coworker Elaine asks, as Holly slides into her seat.

“Yeah,” Holly says, “but she wasn’t a problem. Picked it up really fast. I just kind of get a vibe off her like she’s going through something tough right now. Wish there was more I could do.”

“Hols,” Elaine says. She’s just a few years older than Holly, but she makes a habit of acting like she has to take the sweet but naive junior library staffers under her wing, and she can put a whole world of vague disapprovals and unspoken warnings into a single word. 

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna get involved,” Holly says, with a faint laugh. “Whatever her deal is, we’ll probably never see her again.”

The soldier looks at the book on the Avengers first, because she thinks it will be easier that way, but she discovers quickly that she doesn’t have nearly as much patience as she ought to. She ends up leafing through it quickly, still unconvinced that the photographs of aliens wreaking havoc in a strangely futuristic city aren’t some kind of Hollywood fakery. She has no problem accepting the blue armored humanoids as perfectly real; the problem is the city that the book keeps insisting is Manhattan. While some of the buildings are recognizable—she’d know the Flatiron anywhere, for instance, with or without a sleek thing that looks like a flying motorcycle wedged into its masonry—most of them have more in common with artists’ ideas of floating cities on Mars in the old  _ Amazing Stories  _ magazines than anything she remembers about New York.

She has to pause for a minute when she realizes that she  _ does _ remember both New York City and pulp magazines, but she tucks that away for further inspection at a later date and flips forward to the pictures of Captain America.

She recognizes him immediately as one of the men from the helicarrier, the one with the metal arm. They’ve changed his outfit since the invasion, but he has the mop of dark hair, the piercing blue eyes, and of course, the shield with the star on it, the one he’d thrown at her hard enough that it certainly would have broken the bones of a standard human. (The fact that she doesn’t put herself in that category isn’t as easy to file away as  _ Amazing Stories,  _ but she manages.) The book has precious little detail on the man, not even a name—which wouldn’t have struck her as nearly so strange a week ago. It calls him an Army veteran, and it mentions the metal arm as part of some military experiment, which pings something in the back of her brain—but it’s one of those things she hesitates to explore too closely. She’s just in the intel-collecting stage of her mission now, she reminds herself; she’s gathering the pieces, but there’s plenty of time left before she puts them together.

She pulls the second book toward her, flips it open, and sees the  _ other  _ man from the helicarrier. It’s him, all right: him to the life, small and blonde and squinting into the sun, and it’s right above a caption that says,  _ Steve Rogers, photographed during basic training at Camp Lehigh, 1943, four weeks before undergoing the Erskine procedure. _

The photo is black and white, and it looks old, but what gives the soldier pause more than anything else is the date. She stares at it for a long moment before she flips the book’s pages back to the first leaf and stares at the line that reads,  _ Published in 1966.  _

Then she checks the other book’s copyright page and reads,  _ © SUNY Press, 2011. _

Seventy years. No—more, now, than seventy years. The soldier doesn’t know exactly what year it is, and oh, that pile of things to think about later certainly is stacking up, isn’t it, but from the look of things—the gear the not-yet-Captain America was using when he fought the aliens, the lack of a few fine lines around his eyes that she had ample time to memorize when each of them pinned the other down during their fight—she can only conclude that 2011 is a few years in the past.

And at the same time, impossibly far in the future.

The soldier shuts the covers of both books, pushes them to the edge of the table, and walks out of the library.


End file.
